ABSTRACT
Drawing from Chinua Achebe’s eneke-nti-oba, the bird analogy in his book, Things Fall Apart—the bird that says that if men have learned to shoot without missing, it has as well learned to fly without perching—this chapter, without prejudice to the controversial nature of the weapons, and against the background of the evasive nature of the terrorist insurgent, submits that the use of armed drones in the prosecution of the war on terror is a pragmatic instrument of self-defence by the United States in particular. This is irrespective of the fact that the United States still bears the consequences of the drone strikes—the sometimes-high collateral damage amongst the civilian population, with the attendant “blowbacks” that build the “industrial terrorist complex”. It is also argued here that state consent in drone strikes is not only a matter of necessity in law—and in order to establish a wholesome guiding framework for other prospective user of the weapons in future—consent is also necessary to prevent the aircraft from facing hostile actions from the territorial state, which may result to their being shot down.
